The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Council on Accreditation and School Improvement's review team began work today in Burke County.
SACS CASI accredits 13,000 school districts and schools including East Burke, Freedom and Patton high schools in Burke County.
The review team today and Tuesday will focus more on the school board's performance than on the schools'.
In a series of 45-minute-long meetings, the team will talk with Burke County Public Schools principals and Central Office administrators, teachers and school board members.
The team also will meet with parents and community representatives. Some were chosen because they previously provided information about the schools and school board, according to Dr. Donna James, SACS CASI's North Carolina state director. "We also asked the school system to identify parent leaders," she said.
The accreditation review team's four members arrived in Morganton on Sunday evening. SACS CASI's vice president of communications, Jennifer Oliver, declined to name the team members, because SACS CASI tries to protect them from receiving unsolicited e-mails and phone calls.
Similarly, the review team is trying to protect the anonymity of people with whom it talks and the confidentiality of what they say, one moderator said during a meeting with principals.
All of the review team members themselves have been principals, according to James. Three have been school superintendents, she added, and at least three of the four have experience at the university level.
Prior to their arrival, Oliver said, the team members reviewed complaints and concerns that Burke County residents communicated to SACS CASI's headquarters in Decatur, Ga., and to its state office on the Western Carolina University campus. The team members also examined school board minutes, audio and video recordings of its meetings and the school district's 56-page response to an April 24 letter in which SACS CASI described its concerns about five incidents involving the school board members.
Although a review team will focus on specific concerns, Oliver said, it's not limited to investigating only those issues. The team also will look at how well the schools meet all of SACS CASI's standards.
After it finishes its on-site inspection Tuesday, the review team may ask the school district to supply some additional information this week. The team members then will spend another week and a half to two weeks writing their report.
The report then goes to the state office and to the regional office in Decatur before it's forwarded to the school system.
Oliver predicted the school district will receive the review team report in no more than 30 days.
If the review team finds nothing wrong, it simply may recommend no change in the schools' accreditation.
If it finds the schools are not in compliance with SACS CASI's standards, the team may recommend continuing accreditation "under advisement," meaning a school or district is not meeting one of SACS CASI's standards, but is working on compliance. Another possibility is accreditation "with warning" if a school district is not meeting two or more standards and is not working toward improvement. The team also could recommend a change in accreditation.
Whatever the review team recommends, Oliver stressed, is not final. "They are not the decision-makers," she said.
"It's the national commission and the state councils that take action," James said.
Oliver said SACS CASI currently has a small number of school districts — none in the Carolinas; two in Georgia — on probation while they work on improvements to comply with SACS CASI's standards. The council in such cases sets a time frame for improvements, she said. Depending on the nature of the problems or concerns, that probation period could be up to two years.
On the Web: www.sacscasi.org/
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